“The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That’s where we come in; we’re computer professionals. We cause accidents.”
Quotes of the Day
Sending XHTML as text/html Considered Harmful
A number of problems resulting from the use of the text/html MIME type in conjunction with XHTML content are discussed. It is suggested that XHTML delivered as text/html is broken and XHTML delivered as text/xml is risky, so authors intending their work for public consumption should stick to HTML 4.01, and authors who wish to use XHTML should deliver their markup as application/xhtml+xml.
Ian Hickson — This has been a little controversial. [see the next item]
Sending XHTML as text/html Considered Harmful to Feelings
Ian Hickson wrote a piece awhile ago called Sending XHTML as text/html Considered Harmful. He introduces several main points against sending XHTML documents with a text/html MIME type, which, I believe, are wholly unconvincing. I’ll comment on or refute each of his points below.
Brad Fults on h3h — And a reaction to Ian’s post [see previous item].
Check the first comment, it is from Ian. Certainly, based on his comment, Ian’s argument has been widely and inappropriately applied.
The silly AAC debate is distracting people from noticing that we’ve entered — toes first and with hesitation, admittedly — a new age wherein DRM on online music is no longer limited to the small independent labels.
Newsvine — AAC is the file format used by iTunes for music.
Morfik, an Ajax development platform we covered recently on Read/WriteWeb, has filed a patent dated September 2005 for the compiling of high-level languages into AJAX apps.
Here we go again. I hope this is a joke.
The Textile Editor Helper (TEH) is a text formatting toolbar that will be added to all of your text areas that utilize the TEH feature. TEH was developed to provide a more WYSIWYG-ish option for our users when editing pages or creating blog posts.
Slate Blog — Looks very nice. Should be handy. It is a Rails plug-in and works with actsastextiled. Can’t see the license.
The recent Internet Nastiness experienced by Kathy Sierra has started a discussion about aggression in general; is it ever OK to go on the attack, or should we try to adopt a mutual non-aggression treaty covering the whole blogosphere? On reflection, I think that, yes, it’s OK to go negative, but only if you mean it and are doing it seriously, and only if you’re prepared to deal with the consequences. It may be the case that some legislative tinkering is required to make accountability work better.
Tim Bray on ongoing — I don’t think I agree with Tim on this one. And I’m worried about his new use of the word ‘flame’ — he suggests separating the old ‘flame’ into ‘polemic’ and ‘flame’, where polemics are okay and flames are assaults. What happens when the media latches on to this one? We’ll have a new web-criminal type. Kind of like ‘hacker’. Everyone is aware of what kind of programmer used to be called ‘hacker’?
For example, researchers asked people to write essays in support of a random point of view they did not hold. Months later, when surveyed, the majority held the opinion they wrote about, regardless of the topic. Once a person commits an opinion to writing – even an opinion he does not hold – it soon becomes his actual opinion. Not every time, but MOST of the time.
Ming the Mechanic — Ha! I knew there was a good side to behaving randomly.
1491: Just how many Indians were there?
The section on Amazonia is particularly interesting - the “Stone Age” tribes that we thought had been living in a “state of nature” since time immemorial may instead have been remnant populations - cast “back in time” via catastrophic population loss in the wake of the various European diseases - diseases they had no resistance to.
James Robertson — Sounds interesting. Should note that the people I know who know history at all have always talked as though there were a lot more Indians before the arrival of Europeans than the popular impression.
If this story about vulnerable cursors does not tip us over the line, what will? Whoddathunk that a screen cursor could be the gateway for bad things on your PC?
What to do?
Capability-based systems go back to the 1960s. Someday we’ll have them on the Internets, a series of tubes.
Patrick Logan on Making it stick — I found that story of the cursors really surprising. Things are much worse than I imagined. Patrick is pointing to Capability-based security as a (well-understood and old) technique — if we had security based on capabilities we’d not have these problems — I wonder what problems we’d have then? Very subtle.
Ruby/LDAPFS is similar to LDAPfs(http://www.ldapfs.org/) and LdapFS?(https://ssl.peaceworks.ca/svn/ldapfs/), which enables you to manage LDAP through virtual filesystem.
Rubyforge — This could be really nice if you are having to deal with LDAP.
Rio. A file IO interface inspired by http://rio.rubyforge.org , potentially replaces FileDirectory.
RubyForge — This is something I’ll be checking out soon.
